Quote:
Originally Posted by sheena12
It didn't start and it hasn't ended. Christianity is a living organism. As such it will change and grow. There are things that were thought of as OK 200 or three hundred years ago.
Slavery is one of those things. Most normal Christians find that abhorrent today. Regardless of the side on which their ancestors fought.
A few Christians believe that things never change.
Most would not be comfortable with that idea. One hundred years ago, most women were treated as second class citizens in most Protestant denominations.
Today the reverse is true.
Christianity has always been a progressive, as opposed to a conservative; religion. Jesus was a radical. As progressives, we have always been liberals.
Fundamentalism is the aberration. Not liberalism.
When did Christianity become liberal? When it was founded by Jesus Christ.
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Amen, sheena. You are correct. Revision is actually a good thing and in my "evolutionary scheme of things" the pervasiveness of inconsistencies in its scriptures is one of the sure signs that truth resides in Christian doctrine. One of the redeeming characteristics of Christianity was the emergence of revisions that produced the various denominations and divisions.
Sadly that wisdom has been hijacked and stopped by the emergence of fundamentalism. Christian doctrine has always been riddled with inconsistencies, and rightly so. Paul clearly explained this feature of his teachings, apparently unnoticed by today's "self-appointed apostles,"
I Corinthians 3:1
. . . And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but only as carnal, as to little ones in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Nor are you now ready for it, for you are still carnal.
Paul tells us, Jesus tells us, virtually every other source of doctrine similarly reveals that what has been said and recorded was geared to the capabilities, understanding, and sophistication of the original audience. Since it was necessary to "feed milk instead of solid food" to the early audience, this necessity must become clear eventually and be recognized. Otherwise, we would forever "drink milk and ignore solid food."
The original authors of the doctrine believed in its validity unto the end of time, even though it was designed for an earlier more spiritually and cognitively primitive audience. Therefore, it must contain adequate clues for revising those early simplifications. This is inescapable if the claim of validity for more enlightened future audiences is to be accepted.
As the inevitable advances in human understanding occur, they cause these clues to emerge as inconsistencies until further revision of the underlying truth provides the appropriate explanations. The system is remarkably sound because the doctrine only requires revision when the audience has evolved the necessary understanding to demand it.
Unfortunately, the inconsistencies have begun to cause so much embarrassment and more than a little discomfort for the self-appointed apostles of the various creeds, that their response has not been the intended one. They have doubled down into fundamentalism. The common strategy seems to be to ignore, deny, or somehow try to eliminate or refute the inconsistency in doctrine. In fact, it is for these reasons that many Christians are admonished to read the bible only from their faith, not their intellect, to avoid the "wisdom of man" and side-track some of the embarrassing questions.
When the inconsistencies are too obvious to ignore, they are explained by "veiled inferences" or "God's ways are mysterious" or similar demagoguery, or they are simply removed. From 328 A.D. until 1870 A.D. no less than twenty ecclesiastic or church councils were held to clarify doctrine. Self-appointed judges in the four Lateran Councils between 1123 A.D. and 1215 A.D. decided to remove completely from the bible those writings which did not please them or were inconsistent with their preferred belief system.
Those of you who might be inclined to trust the judgment of those earlier church officials should know that it was during those same periods that true testaments to human ignorance and spiritual abuse, like the infamous "witch hunt" treatise, were issued. This treatise expounded in depth on the detection and disposition of souls that were possessed by a witch! The essence of that "learned" document is easy to summarize:
Once someone in authority decided you were possessed by a witch, you were finished. Your denial was actually used as proof that the witch possessed your tongue and prevented you from admitting it! Unfortunately, the only way to get the witch out was to burn it out.